Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is taking advantage of federally funded research into topological data analysis (TDA) to find new ways of extracting and using information from data sets that are too large and complex to yield to traditional analytical techniques.

Simon DeDeo, a research fellow in applied mathematics and complex systems at the Santa Fe Institute, had a problem. He was collaborating on a new project analyzing 300 years’ worth of data from the archives of London’s Old Bailey, the central criminal court of England and Wales.